“American Dreams in China,” a comedy about business partnership and success, is now the weekly champion of China’s box office, beating Hollywood blockbusters “Iron Man 3” and “The Croods.” While some among the Chinese audience are cheering for the entrepreneurial spirit the movie endorses, others say skeptically that it equates success with wealth and fame.

The movie, which cost $9 million to produce, has taken in over $51 million in ticket sales since it was released on May 17, according to media research firm Entgroup.

Hong Kong-based director Peter Chan's new film is based on the story of real-life company New Oriental Education & Technology Group, the English-language training company that publicly listed in the U.S. in 2006.

But he also drew inspiration from others. At the end of the movie, Mr. Chan salutes a list of Chinese entrepreneurs by pairing photos of what they looked like when starting out with images of how they look today. The entrepreneurs recognized include Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma Lenovo Group founder Liu Chuanzhi, Sohu.com CEO Charles Zhang China Vanke founder Wang Shi, former Google China chief Kai-Fu Lee and others.

Companies have served as the basis for plenty of other movies, like the film “The Social Network” and the television movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley.” But with its allusions to well-known takes of Chinese entrepreneurs who made out well, “American Dreams in China” focuses on the positive outcome of their achievement and how their efforts pay off rather than the potentially destructive power of money and wealth.

Zuma Press

Director Peter Chan attends a screening in Taiyuan on May 15.

The main character resembles Yu Minhong, the chief executive and co-founder of New Oriental. But Mr. Chan stressed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the movie was only loosely based on New Oriental.

Mr. Yu said on his Sina Weibo that he has no investment in the movie and he was against the idea in the first place. “I am not that lame in real life!” Yu wrote.

In 1993 Yu Minhong founded New Oriental with two college friends. The private-education firm focuses on English training for Chinese students preparing to study overseas. The movie portrays its ups and downs, including its U.S. listing and a costly copyright dispute. It doesn’t show more recent headlines involving a U.S. regulatory probe into New Oriental’s financial structure.

Xu Xiaoping, one of the three co-founders of New Oriental, wrote the original script, according to Mr. Chan, who got the script from the China Film Group. “I talked a lot to Xu to grab a sense of the ’80s and his life with his partners, then we completely re-wrote the script,” Mr. Chan told the Journal in Hong Kong.

The movie was set a time when millions of Chinese students flocked overseas for education. Like one character in the movie, some of them chose to come back to China to ride the fast-growing train of China's economy.

The movie has been hotly discussed on Weibo, a twitter-like microblogging service in China. "For those working so hard in start-ups who haven't yet seen twilight, it is worth watching," one person commented.

While some are impressed, some dismiss Mr. Chan’s definition of success. “If success means filling sacks of cash and IPOs in the U.S., showing off in places where one was humiliated before, then the values of the movie are really sick,” another commented on Weibo.

For the critics, the movie says that money can make up for all that one has sacrificed. They compare it to the end of “The Social Network,” in which an actor portraying Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wins the world but keeps refreshing his Facebook page, hoping for a response to a friend request.

The Chinese movie “makes the success of capitalists into fairy tales,” wrote another. “However, I do not see anything amazing or interesting from these characters.”

One notable line from the movie went viral on Weibo. In the movie, Wang Yang, a poet-turned-businessman who is dumped by his American girlfriend, offers at his wedding ceremony to a new love the wisdom he learned from life: never play mahjong with your mother-in-law, never sleep with a woman who has more ideas than you do, and never start a business with your best friends.

As the movie plot develops, the three best friends are on the verge of breakup due to different opinions about the company's future. But their friendship is saved and strengthened when a shared enemy emerges: the U.S., their dream destination. The movie reaches its happy ending while the three are working together to deal with the lawsuit in New York.

In real life, three co-founders of New Oriental went their separate ways. Mr. Yu is the only one who is still with the company. The other two founders cashed out some time after the IPO.